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Really great article on the state of RSS. I’ve seen many posts claiming “RSS is dead”, but to me it’s absolutely not dead — the technology is everywhere on the web! It’s built in inside every major blog system, CMS, web framework and web app. That’s not a dead technology. The problem is, as the article puts it, that RSS hasn’t received the widespread user base it deserves. It’s being ignored, and failed by browser vendors and others.
We lose the ability for websites to push updates to us on their own terms and infrastructure, rather than through closed APIs and flavour-of-the-month platforms. Read the article. I especially love the author’s brainstorming about possible browser features built with RSS. I’ve had a post about RSS in this article’s style in my head since last summer (was gonna name it “RSS Is Not Dead”) but this one nails it.